Fire watch cameras
An amazing site is ALERTOregon which hosts a lot of statewide cameras and even includes links to ODOT road cameras too.
Recently PGE is now publicly hosting wildfire detection cameras it has in the Pacific Northwest. For good or ill, it is one of the reasons we no longer need those old-school fire towers.
3D ASCII rendering
Unusual rendering styles has become very popular lately. In this video, Acerola tries to write an ASCII based 3D rendering shader. Very interesting.
Amazing Text rendered arcade game
Effulgence was just announced and brings some amazing 2.5D rendering to the table – not using blitting or rendering – but drawing text. Check out their Effulgence Steam page or Andrey Fomin’s YouTube channel for more cool looking development videos.
Generate a massive prime number in seconds
PurpleMind demonstrates how modern algorithms generate giant prime numbers in just seconds. The key is they don’t actually check if it is exactly prime, but can do so with very high confidence using certain properties of primes. Bonus points for the fact he gives code too.
Mahoning Drive-in Theater
“At the Drive-in” is a free movie on Youtube about a group of quirky movie buffs work to save a dying drive-in theater. They end up sleeping on the floor, jury-rigging solutions, and holding it together all with their free labor.
Besides saving a theater, it speaks more about a group of individuals that become serious friends and fight to regain a sense of community and simpler times that is increasingly lost. We may be connect to the entire world by the internet but people feel more lonely, isolated, and anxious than ever. One of the folks working there even calls it feeling closer to God – even though he doesn’t know what that is.
Parish communities fill this need for community and belonging – but maybe they should engage social events like this even more. I know that the weekends my parish puts on picnics and events together – they become some of the most joyful and rewarding parts of my week.
Vector Databases and AI
A basic introduction to a vector database and why it’s becoming very interesting for AI workloads.
Speaking Latin at the Vatican
polýMATHY tried to use his Latin to talk to random priests in the Vatican and it goes pretty well. One of my instructors did Latin translations at the Vatican.
I would would have been a barely functional novice with my Latin verbal skills (even when I was still taking classes and using it regularly). My Latin knowledge was almost exclusively read, not spoken – so it would have been rough times. I could listen to him and understand a good bit of what he was saying, but I would have struggled to respond.
Arrow Lake deep-dive
I obviously won’t comment on the accuracy of the analysis – but I am very impressed by the work High Yield did to walk through the die and connecting what he sees with the public technical details. We’ve come a long way since the 386.
Travel Namibia
Namibia is absolutely on my list of places I want to visit.
Anton somewhere takes the almost perfect road trip through the country. During his travels, he stops by Etosha National Park and goes animal spotting by visiting several of the numerous watering holes.
You can get a similar experience by watching the 24 hour live webcam of a watering hole from Gondwana Namib Park. There really is quite an amazing amount of animals that come to the water. It’s especially interesting in mornings/evening to see the different kinds of animals that show up at different parts of the day.